@Smokin Joe
Thank you for a most excellent post. You must have taken a lot of time to collect your thoughts and express your support for President Trump in a clear, logical, and persuasive argument. As your audience, I understand everything you wrote and agree with much of it. Even on the points where we disagree I believe you are honest in your opinion, and your arguments pay respect to anyone's intelligence. It's good stuff well worth the read and I understand and like you more for having read it.
Now I'm going to disagree with some of it. It's not a condemnation of your opinion. Your's is an opinion I shared for almost 30 years, but I no longer see an Us vs. Them, I see a Them vs. Them with the parties, and an American We. I no longer recognize the $23 trillion debt Constitutional Conservatives, who reject impeachment as legitimate. I no longer recognize the pro-tariff and trade war Capitalists. I no longer recognize the Trumpvangelical movement. The battle lines are not clear for me. It appears to me that the deep state is just a euphemism for the democrat party, or anybody who disagrees with President Trump.
You took great pains to disassociate yourself from President Trump in your support for him...like your disdain for his tweets, and who are you to deny God's chosen warrior? I write this knowing it sounds insulting, but unable to rephrase it without losing meaning but I understand what you mean. I used to tell myself that America voted for President Obama to end the debate on racism...If someone said America is racist I could ask them "who is the President?" I believed, and still do believe, America is kissed by God and His will shall be carried out, but I don't believe President Trump is God's will. I think it is a chance for humanity to stand up and say we can do better.
I could spend a lot of time pointing out why I think President Trump is a bad person and a bad leader. However if I do that, your natural tendency, because you like President Trump will be to defend him and discount my opinion. You spent almost no time praising President Trump for his successes but implied you support him for being against what you are against. Do you recognize that your argument is more about how you are against the rats than for President Trump?
Again thanx for taking the time to explain your opinion to me. Please let me know if something I wrote pissed you off, or didn't make sense. Have a nice night.
Nah, I'm not pissed off at anything you wrote, but there are things to clarify.
First, I didn't vote for Trump. I had made the decision to not do so over the mess in Iowa, when another candidate had said he would seek the removal of the Renewable fuels mandate that requires alcohol to be blended into gasoline, the Gov. Of Iowa had a sh*tfit (his son worked for the ethanol lobby), and Trump promptly stepped in and said he'd use the EPA to enforce the blend mandate to the fullest extent of the law (and beyond car warranties, apparently).
That might seem like a strange issue to pivot on, but for a guy who has a herd of older vehicles and no real desire to buy new ones, who has found that ethanol fuels are murder on the fuel systems and who recalls the death of the 10:1 compression ratio street engine when leaded premium went away at the pump, among a host of other considerations like effects on small engines and fuel systems in outboard motors, (I have had relatives stranded a mile offshore while commercial fishing and spent a small fortune replacing fuel system elements to keep my vehicles usable). So, I'm no fan of the ethanol blend and would love to see the mandate go away.
If people want it, they'll buy it, and the marketplace will decide--precisely what my candidate of choice said back then.
The candidate who stood for the marketplace option didn't make it out of the State without the hounds of hell being called down on him by the Iowa Governor, the GOP, the media who distorted a situation there that they created by saying a candidate had dropped out, and another candidate who called him a liar, from then on.
No, I have no love for the tactics used from there against my candidate of choice in the Primaries, without reopening that wound in the sense of fairness, etc. I remember a well coordinated media campaign which finally, after a long progression of well timed and targeted smears, defeated my candidate of choice, partly because I believe the entrenched Democrats and Republicans alike feared him.
While Trump vs Hillary was a no-brainer for most, I was left without someone from either major Party I could support in good conscience or principle. That is just the way it was.
I, understanding the calculus of my state and that those electoral votes would not go to Hillary, voted Constitution Party, more for the Party Platform than the candidate.
That said, (and pardon the digressions, I could probably write a book on why I don't like the President's tactics, from that Primary on), I was aghast at the populist fervor, to the extent that people who had previously joined under the big tent that 'conservatism' has become, viciously vilified those who had always (and continued to do so) stood on the Conservative principles of honesty, forthright behaviour, fairness, manners, demeanor befitting the Office of President, and policy, and with howling about getting on a train, would have shipped their former compatriots off in 40 & 8s for not supporting "their guy".
It was an eye opener, as many of us who had contributed not only time, but money to a online community for nearly two decades, were evicted or left, branded with the orange star of Nevertrump and equated with the very things we had been fighting.
Reason had left the building.
But, like the little maps in the complex, the arrow is accompanied with "You are here", and indeed, we are.
We have always known that the more power and opportunity for illicit enrichment is present, the more those who would corrupt the institutions of the Government will be drawn to that, another reason the Founders instituted a Republic, to keep the powers and scope of any part of it limited to help defray that tendency for the predators to surround a single large water hole of government largess.
That power, through over a century and a half of usurpation, military conquest, expansive interpretations of the Constitutional authority by jurists who, themselves, have ruled that they have power over aspects of our Government and lives they were never intended to have, has become concentrated in the incredibly complex and unwieldy machinery of the Federal Government, and the bureaucracy contained therein has become a self-perpetuating labyrinth of agencies and policies, often contradictory to the letter and principle of the founders writings on Government.
Within that, is an ever expanding opportunity to utilize those mechanisms for fun and profit, to enrich those who hold offices there through anything from kickbacks, graft, bribery, extortion, from the smallest permit to outright treason.
And that is and has been going on, reaching Global proportions as the Republic is sold out.
These bureaucrats are the flesh-eating bacteria of the public service sector, and, as I said, the body politic suffers from an overwhelming rot that must be excised or otherwise removed if the Republic is to survive.
Our Government is not just infected, but swollen to the extent that the brainchild of the Founders would be unrecognizable to them today. It consumes, through overt and hidden taxation over half of the wages of those who exchange their labor for coin, (hardly 'income', but an exchange on par), and then gives billions of dollars we don't have to other countries around the world, entangling alliances that obligate us all to both sides of some conflicts overseas, an expense that increases a debt that far exceeds the annual output of every Citizen, leaving us in thrall to a global financial cartel masquerading as a central bank.
In this we agree, and perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear: This isn't a Republican vs Democrat issue. It is a Government vs the People issue. No matter which form of slavery, no matter what color of chains are chosen for or by us, whether we are allowed the illusion of freely choosing red or blue or green, either way, the effect is the same.
The systemic corruption in every agency, but especially those tasked with keeping Government honest, is reaching lethal proportions, lethal, that is, not to the Government, but to the Republic, the Constitution, the Liberty the people should enjoy.
Tell me the Founders would have tolerated an HOA, much less the Global incursion of Agenda 21 and ICLEI into communities in America. Tell me the Founders would have allowed the tax load on working Americans to even approach 10% (They rebelled at 3%), much less the crippling burden it is, or that the Founders would have (forcibly) redistributed that to those who would not work. Bastardy was a stigma, not the norm, and while individually they supported what they would, it was not the business of Government to 'steal from the rich and give to the poor', an ironic reference to the socialist distortion of 'Robin Hood", from interdicting tax collectors ("the rich") and giving "the poor" (the overtaxed citizens) their money back, to stealing the wages of the productive to subsidize those who will not produce, all done to minimize the role of those traditional avenues of charity in the community, which might place some expectations on those recipients of that largess.
Pardon my digression, let's get back to Trump, the Swamp, etc. Sometimes, when a patient has dead tissue in a serious and complex wound, maggots are used to clean the wound. As repulsive as it sounds, the maggots eat the dead flesh, not the living, and are efficient at what they do, no matter our gut reaction to the process. By removing that which will decay and in so doing kill healthier tissue (and eventually, the patient), the patient, the limb, all survive. Failure to remove that rot will result in the amputation of a limb at best, the death of the patient, at worst.
Washington D.C. has been suffused with corruption, the tendrils of which have reached every crevice and have prospered, regardless of whether that is small, as in 'expediting a permit', right up to the high offices of Government approving the sale of vital and strategic assets to potentially hostile foreign entities. That is just money, at the root of that, and that isn't the worst problem. The worst problem is that the enforcing agencies are being used to selectively enforce regulations which were crafted to allow the prosecution of those who do not agree politically, without regard for what is right.
Mere prosecution can result in poverty, as assets are consumed to defend against such, so the accusation becomes the means of destruction: regardless of whether a conviction is obtained, the targeted suffer.
This self-perpetuating bureaucracy is the Deep State, likely mentored, sponsored, and enabled by a cartel of a few hundred or even a few thousand very wealthy people, who serve their own, often global interests, without regard for our Constitution, our People, our Principles, with the exception of how those can be used to enrich themselves. Those who play ball do well enough, those who play ball well get rich, those who don't are removed from the field.
To those of us who grew up saying The Pledge of Allegiance and The Lord's Prayer, in school every morning, that seems like the stuff spy novels and crazy fiction is made of, a melding of
Brave New World and
1984, but if one removes the veils of partisan or populist fervor, like the little arrow says, "You are here".
For now, the worms are crawling out of the apple, all in pursuit of being that one, that lackey in the eyes of their globalist masters who will earn favor by bringing down a man who was elected in spite of the usual electoral 'fix' that was to reward Hillary for her efforts on behalf of her globalist Masters. In their rush for glory, or as an expression of their hatred for one man who stands in their way, the corrupt are exposing themselves.
The reason I would support a man I have some profound philosophical disagreements with, at least if I go by his actions, is that those actions, whether I agree with his methodology or not, appear to be effective.
I'm a result oriented person, to some degree. There are limits, rules on methodology, to be sure, guided by principle, but in decades, the most effective ferreting out of true Enemies of America is going on since the House Committee on un-American Activities was in session and the FBI was on our side.
It's America vs the Swamp, and the Swamp is just the offspring of the Deep State.
